Summary: If you can remove the contributor or contribution from the TI community and there is no real loss of value, then the person is not notable.

TI Story doesn't include all of the contributors and contributions to the TI community. To try to catalog all of them is not only impossible — there are people, sites, and programs that we will simply never know about — but also rather meaningless in and of itself. Many of the people really did not add anything of value to the community; they were either lurkers behind the scenes, what they released was rather poor quality, or they repeated what others had already done.

In many cases, one site was just a cheap knock-off of another site, simply reposting the programs and games that others had already posted elsewhere online. This not only led to lots of confusion for users as to what version of the programs and games was most current, but also caused some bitter disputes between sites with name-calling and retaliation (see site wars).

Also common was the deluge of small TI-Basic programming groups that sprung up all over the Internet. TI-Basic is a valuable feature included on the TI graphing calculators, and it is simple enough to program that almost anybody can make programs using it. While this resulted in a large variety of TI-Basic programs and games being released, most of them are poor quality, featuring crappy coding, gameplay and graphics, and not even worth downloading. There were also many duplicate programs posted. For example, there are over 100 quadratic solvers for the TI-83+ on ticalc.org.

Generally speaking, the assembly programs that were released were good quality. This is due to the fact that assembly programs are programmed in the calculator's own machine language, which is more difficult to learn, but allows for much greater speed and functionality. Consequently, most people programming in assembly were fairly decent programmers, and thus most assembly programs that you found online were worth downloading.

This begs the question: What criteria do we use to decide whether a contributor or contribution is notable?

The criteria for a person or group is that they not only created high-quality products that were original to the TI community, but were also innovative and pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible. For example, Bill Nagel created the first scrolling platform game on a TI calculator (i.e., Penguins).

The criteria for a site is that it provided multiple services to the community, and was one of the best in those services. For example, TI-News was one of the premier destinations for news in the TI community, often posting news before any other site.

With that said, we believe that the majority of the contributors and contributions that were integral to the TI community's growth and success have been included, and great care has been taken to make sure that their information is as accurate as possible. However, if you believe that an important contributor or contribution should be added, please feel free to add them to the site. We just ask that you provide some documentation or evidence to merit their inclusion.